Forever Young

by Ray Connolly

  Ray Connolly

  Forever Young

  Contents

  Chapter 1 August 1962

  Chapter 2 1983

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 November 1961

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6 January 1962

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8 March 1962

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10 April 1962

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12 May 1962

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 June 1962

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 August 1962

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 August 1962

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 August 1962

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 December 1962

  Chapter 24

  1

  August 1962

  The door opened, slowly and timidly. James heard Michael’s footsteps on the wooden boards behind where he sat on the pavilion steps. Across the lawn he could see the figures of revellers inside the marquee, silhouettes magnified against the white canvas by the makeshift stage lighting. He did not turn to look at his friend. There was nothing that could be said. After a moment the gentle pecking of high heels against the stud imprinted wood told him that Maureen, too, had come out. Still he did not look. In the marquee some beery middle-aged men blew rude sounds on trombones and trumpets in the style they called traditional jazz. Dully James realized that he recognized the tune. How strange, he thought, that his life should be broken to the accompaniment of bubbles in brass. The cricket field before him lay like a black carpet. From inside the marquee came the guffawing of a local fool. But out on the steps of the pavilion, hidden by the night, there was no sound. It was as though all three of them, James, Michael and Maureen, were looking out across the field on the futures beckoning them. Now everything had changed. The events of the evening had imposed a dictator’s will on all their lives.

  James still clutched his guitar; but he was no longer aware of it, nor of the new suit bought especially for this night. Neither counted for anything. A slight breeze rattled on the pavilion shutters behind him, breaking the stillness. Quietly Michael began to walk down the steps, past James and away from Maureen, hesitantly at first and then more hurriedly, as he moved out across the cricket field towards the marquee. And as he did a familiar figure appeared at the canvas entrance, his dark cassock dissolving into the blackness of the field. Then, as James watched, Michael walked away from him, closing the door on their past, robbing them of their future.

  2

  1983

  ‘Benedictus, benedictus, in nomine Domini.’ Twelve shrill boys’ voices punched through the damp air of the church. It was mid afternoon but the chillness of February hung on the breath of the choir. They were not a particularly good choir, just a dozen assorted boys from a small town parish, but they gave of their best which was more than reward for the priest who stood before them beating time with his hands. To be a Catholic priest, Father Michael would tell himself whenever disillusionment threatened to gnaw at him, was to be always grateful. These were not spiritual times and he was fully aware that the winking lights of the space invaders machine in the station café must have been a sore temptation for some of the less vocally gifted of his little choir, just as he had once been similarly distracted by the siren calls of a beckoning Wurlitzer juke box. Being a particularly worldly priest, as one or two of the more elderly parishioners had tartly remarked, he had tried to make the job of choirboy more appealing by introducing modern arrangements to the chants and rituals of his faith. But he could never be unaware that it was usually a close run thing which would break first, the chorister’s voice or his interest in God.

  ‘Benedictus, benedictus.’ The priest’s eyes ran along the small squad of boys as he sang along with them, stopping abruptly as a sudden movement in the back row caught his eye. ‘Hey, you two, remember where you are,’ he chided. Two of the older boys dragged their interest back from their secret game of elbows in ribs. In the front row a slight boy with wavy, dishevelled hair turned around to see what was happening. ‘And you, Paul, concentrate on your singing.’

  Obediently the boy returned to his hymn sheet. The priest watched him sternly for a moment. Paul never complained about choir.

  At three o’clock the priest released them, being a believer in lots of little practices rather than marathon sessions, and with a rush the boys made for the church door. Father Michael could not blame them. The church was huge and dismal and bills were rigorously minimized by allowing heating only on Sundays.

  ‘Quiet now, remember Father Vincent likes a sleep in the afternoons,’ he scolded as the clatter of voices burst on to the churchyard, although secretly he knew that his senior in the parish never slept later than three anyway. The clamour lowered instantly. Paul, he noticed, was lagging behind the other boys. ‘Will I be seeing you tonight then, Paul?’ he asked.

  The boy nodded: ‘I’ll come early and help you set up,’ he half-whispered as though afraid the others might hear, and then scampered off to rejoin one of his friends waiting by the bicycles.

  Father Michael watched them ride away before turning back towards the priests’ house. Paul was still shy with him in front of the other boys, he reflected, still afraid of being teased by them. But he had come a long way, there was no denying that.

  He had first met the boy two years earlier just after his appointment to Bickerston, when as a means of introduction he had taken his guitar along to the children’s ward of the Hospital of St Theresa and held an impromptu singsong. It had been a performance which he liked to feel had been generally appreciated, excepting the little boy who had sat on the bed by the door, observing everything, but refusing to join in.

  The boy, he had discovered, had been admitted the previous night for observation after complaining of stomach pains. But appendicitis had not been diagnosed and he had been dressed and was waiting for his mother, a sister in the casualty ward, to call for him. He was a silent, suspicious child who watched and waited. And when his mother did at last appear just after noon he leapt from his bed and attached an anxious hand to the belt of her navy blue nurse’s raincoat, a grip which, the priest had thought, would take wirecutters to loosen. ‘I’m afraid he mustn’t like my singing,’ Father Michael had joked as the boy’s mother, embarrassed that she, a nurse, should appear to have been over-anxious, had taken the child out of the ward. But he had known that not to be the real reason for the boy’s reserve, for Paul had watched the priest’s fingers find the chords to the guitar with a fascination bordering on avarice.

  After that initial encounter it had not been long before the priest’s acquaintance with the boy and his mother had been renewed. Bickerston was a small enough town, and St Joseph’s parish a tight enough community, to guarantee that before very long a lively young parish priest would become friendly with virtually all the church-going Catholics in the area.

  On his visits to the local Catholic boys’ school he would see Paul sitting by the window, refusing to be drawn into class discussions, but ever alert to everything which was being said, and at the hospital he would nod a smile of recognition to the boy’s mother whenever their paths should happen to cross. He also saw them at late mass on Sundays where they would be accompanied by a daughter three or four years older than Paul, a pretty girl who compensated for Paul’s introversion with a mischievous, outgoing charm. They were a close, apparently happy family, in which there was no sign of a man.

  The parish of St Joseph’s was Father Michael’s third appointment in the thirteen years since he had left the seminary and it was his happiest. At first he had believed his vocation to lie in teaching and had laboured hard, first at a
private school in Yorkshire where he had taken the younger boys in history and music and then in Glasgow where he had put his teaching talents to the test of less willing pupils. But to his surprise he found the role of teacher grew less appealing with every successive term. He was not an impatient man but teaching made him irritable and, try as he did, he found scant sympathy for those who did not wish to learn. Then, just when he was beginning to dislike the sort of man teaching was turning him into, out of the blue had come the chance of a temporary appointment as assistant to the parish priest in the town of Bickerston. He had gone there with mixed feelings at first, since it had never been part of his plan to become pastor to a middle-class, middle-paced town in the middle of Oxfordshire. But it had not been long before he realized, despite the occasional irascibility of his senior colleague in the parish, Father Vincent, that for the first time since leaving the seminary he was content. Perhaps, he sometimes reproached himself, that was not the feeling that a soldier of Christ should wish to enjoy so thoroughly, but the role of parish priest brought with it a sense of belonging which was seductive. This was certainly not the life for which he had prepared himself while in the seminary, nor was it for this that he had joined the Church. But then he doubted if he had ever understood the combination of forces and events which had propelled him into making that decision.

  For two years he had been happy at St Joseph’s. Bickerston was one of the ancient towns of central England that had grown up around a Roman bridge and had, in the Middle Ages, been the centre of a sheep-farming district. Now most of the sheep were gone and the Roman bridge had been by-passed by a large concrete fly-over capable of bearing the heavy juggernauts which plied daily between the factories of the West Midlands and the motorways heading east and south. But the town, now surrounded by new housing estates, had survived, although now it was a backwater rather than a thoroughfare, a place best known for its schools and college. Although his initial appointment had been on a temporary basis he was not disappointed when it was suggested to him that he might like to stay and help with the duties on a permanent basis since Father Vincent was no longer a young man. If Father Michael had ever possessed any ambitions in the church he had known then that they were never to be accomplished as he became enveloped by a feeling of relief that he need no longer put his faith to the daily tests of impatience.

  But although his new job had taken him away from the mortifications of the classroom he could not be unaware that the pastoral role of the priest rekindled areas of his imagination and personality which had long been dormant. While some modern priests chose to confront their own sexuality head on by moving in areas of temptation Father Michael had always preferred to heed the advice of an older priest who had befriended him in the seminary. ‘Celibacy will take care of itself, Michael,’ he had been told, ‘so long as you take care to keep out of the company of young and attractive women.’ In the schools this had not been difficult. Out in the parish of St Joseph there was no avoiding them. At first he had been awkward, not knowing how to speak to women other than within the reference of work, but gradually he had redeveloped some of the easiness which he had possessed before he entered the seminary. And as the months went by the woman he became most at ease with was Paul’s mother, Mary. Indeed it had been considerably easier to make friends with Mary than with Paul, who was uneasy with all men. The breakthrough with the boy had occurred at a fundraising Christmas party in the church hall. Equipped with his guitar again Father Michael had set himself up in a corner and challenged anyone to name a rock and roll hit song which he could not play and sing. With adults paying thirty pence a song and children (who didn’t know any of the songs, anyway) fifteen pence, the priest earned nearly twenty pounds for hampers for pensioners before his voice ran out. Again he had found that he had a constant watcher in Paul, who loitered on the outside of the little crowd assembled around him. And again he had noticed that the boy’s eyes had hardly left the strings of the guitar. When the performance was over Paul had not immediately dashed away as the priest had expected.

  ‘Can you play anything?’ Father Michael had asked quietly as he had returned the instrument to the old case which had been its home for over twenty years.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘Would you like to learn?’ the priest persisted.

  ‘Yes, please,’ had come the reply after the longest of pauses.

  And so, drawn together by the guitar, the two had become friends, Paul cautious and wary at first, but becoming increasingly trusting until now, two years after their first meeting, the priest and the boy were something more than firm friends. Paul was fixated on Father Michael.

  That afternoon as Father Michael made his way back between the gravestones to the priests’ house he reflected on his good fortune in having been appointed to St Joseph’s. It was, he remembered, the sort of town he had grown up in, the sort of place where he had fallen in love with the guitar and made impossible plans. But just as quickly as he remembered those days he steeled himself to forget. There were some things he would rather not think about.

  The priests’ house, though large and barely furnished, was not uncomfortable, particularly on fine days, and this afternoon, although cold, it was filled with a late winter sunshine. It was a large, detached Victorian house built at the same time as the church on an endowment left by one of the better off ladies of the parish–although quite why she had made provision for the building to contain eight bedrooms no one had ever been able to fathom. The front aspect of the house faced directly on to the side of the church, which lay on the far side of a copse of gravestones, and the back had uninterrupted views of fields and woods. When Father Michael had first come to St Joseph’s he had been offered a very spacious room opposite Father Vincent’s on the first floor, but on further exploration had chosen to redecorate one of the attic rooms, where the sloping eaves with windows to the south and the west promised an abundance of sunlight and a view of the Welsh hills on a clear day. The redecorating had never been more than a perfunctory measure performed with a sponge roller and a large tin of white emulsion paint, but the room had a brightness to it which contrasted cheerfully with the sombre shades of the rest of the house.

  During his first months there Father Michael had crept about the house like an uninvited and unwanted guest, afraid that he might find himself on the wrong side of one of his older colleague’s tongue lashings. But now experience had taught him that much of what he had at first taken for bad humour on Father Vincent’s behalf was often no more than a cranky form of teasing. Father Vincent and he would never be close friends, and the two, when left together, found little to talk about. But although he made a great show of protesting about the music Father Michael liked to play and listen to, the older man had never found anything serious to criticize.

  From his narrow little window at the top of the house Father Michael stared down on the rear garden. He had been right. Father Vincent was not sleeping. He could see him now at the end of the garden standing by the five sheep he kept as pets and self-operating lawn mowers. Father Michael turned away from the window. He had a busy afternoon ahead of him. Opening his desk he took out a selection of pens and Magi-markers and large poster-sized sheets of paper. Then spreading them very carefully on the floor of his room he began to sketch a poster advertisement, first in pencil then in colour. ‘Come to the 706 Union,’ he wrote. ‘St Joseph’s Church Hall. Raffles, competitions and all the best rock and roll music.’ With a flourish he added a scattering of musical notes, and then more carefully drew a guitar. Then satisfied that he could not improve upon his work he wrote at the bottom: ‘Seven-thirty until eleven, every Friday.’

  It was hardly a masterpiece of creative advertising, he would have been the first to concede, but it made its simple point. Leaving it to dry on his bed he quickly set about drawing half a dozen variations. Then when they were dry he chose the best four, rolled them up and hurried down the stairs to his car.

  ‘Honey Bee, you’ve
been cheating with your honey, Honey Bee,’ he sang as he turned out of the churchyard and headed into town. He had no idea why he chose that song. He hadn’t sung it for years, but it was one where he thought he gave a passable imitation of Howling Wolf and he liked the sound he made. ‘Honey Bee, you’re cheating with your honey, And taking all my money, Your lying ain’t so funny to me. Oh, Honey Bee, won’t you let me taste your honey, Honey Bee.’

  The car stopped at a set of traffic lights. A smart Citroen CX pulled alongside him, and an attractive woman wearing a headscarf tied in a knot at the nape of her neck looked in at him, smiling. He stopped singing, feeling self-conscious. A priest driving along doing a Howling Wolf imitation to a song he had written twenty years earlier must be a comical sight, he could see that. Silently he ran over the lines in his mind. For the first time the sexual significance of the last line hit him. ‘Won’t you let me taste your honey, Honey Bee,’ he murmured. Could they really have been so innocent all those years ago not to have realized what they were singing? Perhaps James had stolen that line from another song. Surely they were never so decadent? And then he remembered as he did nearly every day of his life. He had promised himself never to wonder about James.

  ‘They’re all burglars, you know. You’d better watch out.’

  ‘What?’ Paul wasn’t exactly sure what his friend Luke meant, but he had a good idea. They always cycled home together after choir practice, and Luke would invariably have some sarcastic comment to make about Father Michael. He was, thought Paul, probably jealous that Paul should have a better friend than him, but his constant carpings could be aggravating. Today Luke was in fine form.

  ‘Burglars … you know, willy-woofters. It’s a well known fact. All priests are like that. It’s because they never marry. They either become burglars or they go mad.’

  ‘Very funny.’ Paul concentrated on the front wheel of his bicycle, refusing to be drawn.